This inquiry is designed to advance theoretical and practical knowledge about retirement processes. It attempts to account for differential behavioral patterns of retirement by offering objective and subjective definitions of the event "retirement". "Subjective" retirement denotes derived measures from subjects' interpretations of and resources for coping with the termination of employment; "objective" retirement denotes the actual termination of employment. These measures are used to account for psychological stress, life satisfaction, marital satisfaction, depression, and illness. The information obtained will be useful to persons engaged in pre- and post-retirement programming, intervention therapy, and policy creation. Three designs are run concurrently: a field experiment, a panel study, and a post-test-only control group experiment. The primary data analysis will be conducted by multiple regression analysis, lag correlations and MANOVA. The derived variables will be computed using multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis.